Like so many others, I’ve been delving heavily into the world of digital theatre over the past year. It quickly became apparent that the tools and techniques employed by a Digital Technician are wildly different to those used in a normal theatre space. Gone are our sound and lighting desks; in their place webcams and stream keys. Instead of moving set around during a scene change, we may now find ourselves seamlessly mixing between prerecorded footage and live feeds.
I’d like to use this space to introduce some of the tools that I find essential to teching digital theatre. In future posts, I will go into more detail about each tool, and discuss how they all tie together. First though, let’s look at the tasks that I often find myself performing in this role:
- Managing video feeds from one or more performers
- Arranging these feeds into scenes and mixing between scenes
- Triggering sound effects and visual effects
- Playing media (eg. pre-recorded footage or presentations)
- Streaming the final product to Youtube, Facebook etc.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at some of the tools we can use to make this all happen.
ZoomOSC
Created by the team at Liminal Entertainment Technologies, ZoomOSC is a fantastic tool for manipulating webcam feeds. With most of the features of the regular Zoom platform we’re all familiar with, it also integrates the Open Sound Control protocol. For those unfamiliar with OSC, it is a protocol developed initially to help music software and hardware communicate through ethernet. It has expanded and is now used extensively in theatre and events to help synch up different playback devices. An example of this might be triggering a sound effect, and having it simultaneously run a cue on your lighting console.
With ZoomOSC, we can now automate many Zoom tasks such as pinning and spotlighting video feeds, muting participants, and even screen sharing. This really takes the pressure off during a show, as you can pre-program any command and simply cue it up when needed (more on this later). No more fumbling for the spotlight button during a key moment! If you wanted to take this a step further, you could use a MIDI controller (such as Novation’s Launchpad) and a MIDI-to-OSC application, and now you can spotlight anyone you need with the push of a button! This is wildly useful for an event such as a panel discussion, or for improv-style shows, where you need to be able to react quickly and accurately.
OBS Studio
OBS Studio is a free, open-source broadcasting tool and visual mixer. It lets you take your video feeds (from Zoom or another source) and arrange them how you want on the screen. From here, you can apply effects such as green-screen filtering, add overlays, and mix images and videos in with your live feed. This allows for some creative combinations – for example using an animated rain overlay to create a surprisingly convincing weather effect. I’ve even worked on shows where live performers and animated digital characters have been standing side-by-side having a conversation! The possibilities really are endless. Most importantly, OBS Studio allows you to send your final mixed video to a livestreaming site like Twitch or Youtube so the world can watch your show.
In addition to the many inbuilt features, OBS Studio supports the addition of plugins. With these, you can extend the functionality of the software to meet your exact needs. There are plugins that add fancy new transitions and plugins that add advanced scene switchers. Whilst I haven’t dabbled too deeply into the world of plugins, there is one that I rely on heavily. The OSC-for-OBS plugin allows you to switch scenes, set transitions and play videos with similar commands to the aforementioned ZoomOSC. Noticing a theme here?
This leads us nicely on to…
QLab
An industry standard amongst theatre professionals, QLab by Figure53 lets you cue up sound effects, lighting cues and projection. In a digital setting, I use it primarily for playing sound. It is an incredibly well made piece of software, which many of you are probably already very familiar with. You can easily balance levels, apply fades, trigger one-shot sound effects – the full works.
The final piece in the puzzle comes when you rent or buy any of QLab’s advanced licenses. Activating any of these licenses gives you the ability to send OSC messages. Because of this, QLab has become the brains of almost any digital shows that I work on. From one place, you can control all your other pieces of software. This lets you play sound effects, control Zoom functions, and trigger scenes and visual effects – essentially making the whole thing run together as one entity. And the best bit is that this can all be pre-programmed. Suddenly you have full control over your show, and all you need to do is hit the spacebar at the right moments to trigger your cues. A series of potentially stressful and fiddly tasks, all at the push of a button. Brilliant.
That’s all for now, but I’ll be expanding on these ideas in coming posts. Thanks for taking the time to read!